Calling Ukraine

November 1, 2022

Escaping his messy life by taking a job in Ukraine teaching custom service agents to sound as if they came from the United States, thirtyish John Turner finds that his students are perfectly fluent but don't get small talk. Meanwhile, he doesn't understand the Ukrainian language or culture, and hearing his next-door neighbor beating his wife puts him in an ethical quandary. From National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, author of Such Good Work.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 6, 2023
No good deed goes unpunished in this madcap dark comedy from Lichtman (Such Good Work), set in 2018 Ukraine. John Turner, a down and out freelance writer in Portland, Ore., accepts an offer for a job in Lutsk, Ukraine. There, he’s expected to train a staff of five at a call center for an American rental agency on how to “sound natural.” He’s woefully unprepared; he neither speaks nor understands Ukrainian and has no grasp on the culture. He tries to befriend a developer named Serhii but loses his cool after Serhii tricks him into asking a cleaner for sex. He also flirts with one of his employees, Natalia, who is married. When he learns Natalia’s husband, Anatoly, gave her a black eye, he embarks on a harebrained scheme to protect her, thinking he can bribe Anatoly with cash. While already on shaky ground and still struggling to master basic Ukrainian phrases, John has an ill-advised encounter with Anatoly that turns on a dangerous misunderstanding. Lichtman delivers a perfect send-up of the American abroad: John isn’t just naive, he’s imperious and condescending (on one of his employees: “The way he said the word ‘misconceptions’ sounded like he was trying it out for the first time. I wanted to give him a hug”). This is devilish and energizing. (Apr.)Correction: The character Serhii's name was misspelled in an earlier version of this review.

March 1, 2023
Lichtman's (Such Good Work, 2019) sardonic, twisty second novel follows its 30-year-old former journalist narrator, John Turner, into 2018-era Ukraine during a period when the country was a mere blip on the U.S. public radar. John has been recruited to improve customer service at his old college friend's short-term rental start-up, working at the company's call center in Lutsk. John doesn't let the fact that he has no idea what he's doing stop him, while falling immediately in love with his married colleague Natalia and deciding how to handle the apparent spousal abuse going on in the apartment next to his. When Lichtman veers late in the novel into the minds of Natalia and her husband, another former journalist, the reader learns just how mistaken John is in his assumptions about Ukraine and the people he thinks he knows there. While abrupt tonal shifts and some very dark comedy may put some readers off, the novel makes sharp points about mutual misunderstanding between U.S. residents and people living in countries of the former Soviet bloc.

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Starred review from March 31, 2023

Lichtman's sophomore novel (after Such Good Work) follows the suddenly aimless John, who impulsively moves from the United States to Ukraine after an offer comes through from an old college buddy. His job is to manage a small call center for his friend's thriving homestay start-up, and his primary directive is to train the customer-service representatives in the nuances of U.S. small talk. From this premise, Lichtman crafts a slyly cerebral work that initially has the makings of a lighthearted workplace farce but then moves into darker comedy and headier observation. John is hyperconscious of the worst perceptions of U.S. citizens living abroad and endeavors to avoid such clich�s, but as cultural nuances are further abstracted and the 2022 Russian war in Ukraine approaches, the blurriness of ethics and relationships only builds. Through it all, Licthman returns to the novel's locus: an exploration of language, how our limits of expression--linguistically and emotionally--likewise limit our ability to fully know others, and the tragic ways we constantly talk past each other. As he balances these myriad thematic threads with a complete mastery of tone, Lichtman never gives into messages of either misery or contentment, instead asserting their ever-presence in our lives and particular symbiosis. VERDICT A playful, incisive, and deeply human novel of cultural and personal disconnect that should appeal to fans of Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station and Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts.--Luke Gorham

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Starred review from February 1, 2023
A stylish and often surprising American-expatriate novel for the not-quite-post-colonial age--and a portrait of Ukraine in the run-up to Russia's 2022 assault. It's 2018. John Turner, just turned 30, has suffered both a romantic breakup and the death of his father. A college friend calls with a ridiculous-sounding opportunity: Might he move to western Ukraine to train call-center reps in idiomatic American English? Despite having no contacts and no experience with either the Ukrainian or the Russian languages, John takes the plunge. He foresees a chance to rebuild himself, part monastic retreat, part grand adventure. It turns out that the reps most need a crash course in chipper American small talk, which they find baffling, and the effort to provide this brings John closer to them; despite his determination not to succumb to morally dubious clich�, he struggles against a crush on one, Natalia, and befriends another, with whom he trains in boxing. John's effort also provides Lichtman an opportunity to reflect on cultural differences, on the twilight of the so-called American Age... and on the damage peculiar to the representative of empire who is sheepish, guilty, exquisitely sensitive, and determined to make everyone agree that he has no imperial intent. Perhaps most impressive is Lichtman's high-wire act of tone. In the book's first half, John is largely an earnest goof, well meaning and bewildered. But when a comic figure like that is set down in a country inured to tragedy--and as the undeclared Russian war worsens and a comic actor is elected to the Ukrainian presidency--it becomes clear that John's misunderstandings and awkwardnesses, his accidents of language (when he panics, he tends to blurt out a phrase that means "have sex with me"), can't stay mere fish-out-of-water humor. In places like Ukraine, comedy is backed with consequence. John keeps overhearing neighbors fighting--a suffering woman, her brutal spouse--and can't decide what to do. Call the police? Intervene himself? Can domestic violence be a cultural difference? A sometimes rollicking, sometimes tragedy-tinged novel about a not-so-innocent abroad.

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